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Facebook Closing In On Inactive

Over the next few weeks, online marketers who use Facebook may see their number of Page Likes decrease a little bit. While this is never a good thing to see, marketers can take convenience in the fact they haven’t done anything wrong. Facebook announced a plan to clean of the Page Likes of business pages simply by removing certain pages from the count.

Pages that were deleted from the Page Like are also deactivated from Facebook. This new move will remove two groups of accounts from Page Like counts. The account types in question, memorialised accounts and deactivated accounts aren’t technically deleted, but they will no longer be included a business page likes.

Voluntarily deactivated accounts are accounts where the user has chosen to turn the account off but not delete it. This indicates they can turn the account back on later, if they wish. Individuals will not worry of losing their files if they like to take a break and deactivate their Facebook account. While the account is deactivated, businesses page will lose the like coming from that Facebook user. Nevertheless, the likes will come back automatically once the account is reactivated.

Memorialised accounts, on the other hand, are the accounts of people who have died. The person’s page will say it’s for “Remembering” the original creator. In this case, the business pages liked by that person will the like forever. Though presumably, the fact that they liked the business will probably still show if you look at their friends list. It just won’t affect the page like count.

Though it’s irritating to lose a like, marketers shouldn’t be too annoyed with this move by Facebook. Removing these inactive account types from the metrics is beneficial for people utilizing Facebook Insights to guide their social marketing plans. As an extreme example of what could happen, a retirement community would seem like it was liked by a lot more octogenarian and older followers than they really did.

Many marketers might not have known this, but Facebook already filter likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from individual Page posts. So rather than a radical change, this update is truly just keeping the data consistent.

This change should affect nearly all businesses. It’s likely that most businesses have had at least some fans die if they’ve been around for a couple of years and cater to all age groups. Facebook users are not active most of the time, there are cases where they are also getting time out in Facebook, so losing likes is equal to all pages at some point. This change could affect many pages but it will only have minimal effect to those pages with dip in page likes.

If business owners and marketers have no idea about these countless choices, they could start making some study and try to learn everything about it. For instance, those accounts from individuals who passed away could be utilized by someone in order to create legacy contact so as to access and run the account. You can decide to deactivate or delete the account on the other hand.